Three of Yandex’s five Russian datacenters were hit by Ukrainian drone strikes, and the company’s cloud and payments platforms went dark as engineers raced to bring services back.
The opening round came overnight on October 7 and 8. The Sasovo facility absorbed serious damage and was shut down completely. Kaluga’s datacenter took a fresh hit on the morning of October 9, and part of its infrastructure went offline. A third attack landed on the Vladimir site, the one that backs Yandex Pay.
Dima Pirogov, who runs Yandex’s fintech division, used Telegram to tell customers that his team was verifying every step before restoring access and that their money was secure. Customer funds are not at risk, he said, adding that he could not yet promise a working service or a firm recovery timeline. Yandex said it was prioritizing the most-used products, with Search, Mail, Maps, the Alice AI assistant, and Taxi already coming back while other features stayed down.
Broad outages appeared on the company’s status page for Yandex Cloud, the firm’s public cloud platform. Support staff described the platform as running in a limited mode, warned that response times had grown due to heavy demand, and told customers to host resources on alternative sites.
Netblocks, which tracks internet connectivity, put Yandex Cloud traffic at roughly 30 percent of normal levels on October 11.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky framed the strikes as payback for Russian attacks on Kyiv datacenters. Four people died in September when Russian drones hit a business center in the capital, the BBC said, and the damaged datacenter cut internet access for roughly 100,000 households.
The takeaway for operators is that concentrating services in a handful of sites turns a geographic event into a platform-wide failure, so recovery plans should assume several facilities go dark at once.
